Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has eliminated the public do-not-call list and a related disclosure list that once flagged as many as 200 current and former Chicago police officers with documented credibility problems, replacing them with an internal system that leans heavily on officers to report their own misconduct. The change, enacted through a December 2025 policy, has alarmed defense attorneys who say they now sometimes learn of an officer’s troubled history as late as the morning of trial.
Burke, who took office in December 2024, overrode the county’s previous Brady/Giglio disclosure framework in March 2025 before rolling out the December 2025 policy, according to a timeline laid out by The Chicago Reporter. That policy replaced the old lists with an internal “officers relieved of police authority” list and confidential Brady/Giglio files, and it now requires prosecutors to document misconduct, dishonesty, credibility findings, and social media activity. Under the new framework, the Burke administration relies more heavily on officers’ own responses to a standardized Brady/Giglio questionnaire, and disclosures are supposed to be made as soon as practicable rather than through a running public roster.
Her predecessor, Kim Foxx, took a very different approach. Foxx maintained a public do-not-call list alongside a separate internal disclosure list, and Cook County officers were notified whenever they were placed on either one, with 90 days to challenge that placement. In July 2023, Foxx’s office publicly released a version of that list identifying 174 current and former law enforcement officers, including 120 Chicago police officers, who were precluded from testifying due to severe misconduct — a roster that included high-profile names like Jason Van Dyke, Ronald Watts, and Reynaldo Guevara.
Why Prosecutors Are Obligated to Disclose
The legal foundation for all of this traces back to two U.S. Supreme Court cases. Brady v. Maryland established prosecutors’ duty to disclose material evidence favorable to the defense, while Giglio v. United States extended that disclosure duty specifically to evidence undermining a government witness’s credibility. Together, Brady and Giglio require prosecutors to actively determine whether evidence exists that could undermine a witness’s credibility, and Kyles v. Whitley later held that prosecutors must learn of favorable evidence known to police and other government actors, not just what lands on their own desks…